Sponsor

I’ve found this terminal while testing Crunchbang, Terminator is CrunchBang’s default terminal. Its based on Gnome terminal, its best feature is it’s ability to show multiple terminals on one screen, but it also uses tabs aswell.

It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, quadkonsole, etc. in that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids (tabs is the most common default method).

Installation

Terminator is available for virtually any Linux distribution, so use your package manager and most likely you will find the package.

Features

So far I’ve used Gnome terminal so switching to this software has only brought some new features, while keeping all the old behaviors.

These are the main features of terminator:

Arrange terminals in a grid

Tabs

Drag and drop re-ordering of terminals

Lots of keyboard shortcuts

Save multiple layouts and profiles via GUI preferences editor

Simultaneous typing to arbitrary groups of terminals

The 2 features i really like of Terminator are the menu that allow you to split the terminal horizontally or vertically, so you can have on the same screen 2 different terminal, like having in the bottom the tail -f of a log file(in order to monitor any changes immediately) and on the top you can give commands.

And the second feature i like it’s the possibility to send commands on simultaneous to many terminals, when you work with 2 (or more) machines that must have the same configurations this can save you a lot of time.

And then you can combine these two things, so see on the same screen many terminals and send to all the same commands.Terminal Management

Ctrl-Shift-o: Split the screen horizontally

Ctrl-Shift-e: Split the screen vertically

Ctrl-Shift-t: Open a new tab

Ctrl-Shift-w: Close the current terminal

Ctrl-Shift-q: Quit Terminator

Conclusions

A great terminal program, much similar to gnome-terminal but with more options, so why don’t use it ?